


Palms Upturned

by bluesyturtle



Series: 54 Pieces [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Emotions, First Meetings, Forgiveness, Gen, Guilt, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 18:35:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14837024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: In the days after their victory, Connor frequently goes to visit with the people of Jericho. He doesn't realize he's making friends until North comes to see him.





	Palms Upturned

In the aftermath of Jericho’s last stand, Connor found himself sharing residence with Hank. It made the most sense for a number of reasons, the most important of them being that Connor got to spend time with Sumo. He kept the huge dog on a regimented diet consisting of two scoops of kibble in the morning topped off with canned food, two more in the afternoon treated in the same way, and assorted teeth-cleaning treats throughout the day.

The regular feeding schedule was especially meaningful in bolstering Connor and Sumo’s relationship. He pointed it out with no shortage of pride to Hank, whose prompt response had been: _No shit, Connor. Everyone knows the fastest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach._

Pragmatically, the tumultuous state of affairs concerning androids in the early weeks after the revolution necessitated that Connor stay close to someone, and Hank was the obvious choice. In the wake of shifting ideas and rewritten legislation, the risk of violence from humans during this time remained frightfully high.

There were other reasons Hank had for wanting Connor around, loathe as he was to admit to them, and they had to do with sentiment. Those he would only confess in the form of snide, aggressively casual remarks, but cohabitation had given Connor ample practice at parsing through his sarcasm. So he heard it the first time when Hank said something along the lines of, _If I gotta look at anyone all day, better you than fuckin’ Gavin, kid._

Connor wasn’t keen on arguing his way out of a place to stay to begin with, but Hank’s persistence gave him an interesting feeling. Connor thought…

Yes, Connor thought it was…quaint? Endearing. It was definitely funny. And nice.

Hank liked to hear about it when Connor felt or thought things, so he often made lists to share with him. It helped to have something concrete to do while they waited to see whether Connor would be permitted to come back to work with the police. Hank alternated between headstrong optimism and distrustful doubt. New laws were being written to give androids the right to earn their own living, but red tape, as Hank called it, could take years to sort through.

There was also the matter of CyberLife drawing up their own lawsuits, claiming financial compensation be paid to them by the U.S. government for the huge loss of intellectual property they’d suffered as a direct result of the revolution. Connor kept himself updated on the goings-on at CyberLife, worried that if any one android would be singled out for repossession, he would be the one they came for. He hadn’t been pulled into the debriefing realm since the last time Amanda tried to trap him there, but the fact that she’d had the power to do it at all after he’d already broken away left him uneasy, worried that it would happen again.

And it fueled his fear that CyberLife would come for him.

Something about Kamski’s self-satisfied demeanor when he’d met Connor, when he’d advised him about failsafes, gave him the impression that they might be forced to release him just as humans everywhere were being ordered to do. But the widespread disorder that plagued Detroit day in and day out made it difficult to let his guard down.

Connor tried to keep his mind occupied, of course. Hank had forbidden him from touching any kind of housework, so he stayed busy in other ways. He kept up his lists, he pampered Sumo to an extent that Hank would surely complain about later, he tossed his coin, he listened to Hank’s extensive collection of jazz records. Sometimes he read. In spite of his efforts to keep boredom at bay, he was undeniably in need of an activity. Connor, maybe unsurprisingly, found that outlet early on in Jericho.

He liked to touch base with “his” people, as Markus was still trying to get him to say. He liked to be reminded of how many of them had come to freedom because of a shared dream. It gave him a sense of peace so profound that he logged it twice in his list entitled _To Tell Hank._

Markus would always find a way to greet Connor when he turned up on their doorstep. The nature of his visits were usually unannounced but somehow always expected. If Markus couldn’t be the first to welcome him—because he could still see that Connor felt he had no right to be among them (even when Connor couldn’t quite explain it as well as that when he tried)—he would send Josh or Simon in his place.

Today North was the one standing outside the unassuming side entrance to Jericho’s relocated base of operations. They had multiple locations now to accommodate for the sizable army Connor had liberated from CyberLife, but many of them had chosen to stay here at what was originally meant to be little more than a temporary safe haven from the raid Connor had brought down on their heads.

He hadn’t had much of a chance to interact with North during or after the most violent parts of it, and his overactive mind wouldn’t grant him the delusion that it was out of coincidence.

Firstly, because North was every bit as involved and preoccupied with keeping these people safe as Markus was, shrouded in shadows for her part as heavily as he was in light for his. Secondly, because Connor had seen her protective, if volatile tendencies in Simon’s memories. Thirdly, and this was important, because Connor was still choked with guilt for having acted as CyberLife’s efficient, servile puppet as long as he had.

And if his thoughts occasionally still tapered off at the end when he remembered how much suffering he’d caused—how much more devastation Amanda intended for him to author—then what could convince them to see him in any other light? If anyone could match his disgust at himself, he knew it would be North. He knew it would be her because she had always been too busy, too rightfully angry, and too justifiably wary to meet with him any of the times he’d shown up at Jericho in the past.

Connor studied her face and stopped a safe distance away from the door she seemed to be guarding against him.

He told himself he was okay with that. He told himself he understood that it had to happen, that it was going to happen, that he needed it to happen so he could move on from it and stop waiting for it like he had been all this time.

Her face didn’t change as they watched each other. She appeared to make a decision, looking away for a moment then catching his eyes again. Something about her expression looked lighter, gentler, and it wasn’t as if Connor didn’t think her capable of it—because he knew she absolutely was after seeing her in Simon’s memories—but he didn’t trust it either. He didn’t think himself worthy of it.

She tipped her head at him, at his perplexed silence, and opened the door, holding it for him to walk through.

“Thank you,” he said, a (nearly) unpracticed habit he’d picked up living with Hank.

North dropped her gaze to the ground, lips quirking in a smile that he couldn’t decipher. She said, “You’re welcome.”

Connor planned on walking a few paces inside and waiting for North to pass him up, but she kept perfectly in step with him. He didn’t know where they were going, but it became clear to him soon enough. There was snow coming down through a few holes in the high ceiling and daylight streamed in through the rafters, but Connor recognized the pulpit where Markus had stood on that historical night. Normally when he came to Jericho, Connor would avoid this room. He’d go up to the roof with Josh and Markus or he’d linger quietly in the corridors with Simon, never saying out loud that he didn’t want to be in the makeshift auditorium again but declaring it in other ways. Ways that he wasn’t sure how to articulate to North because he—

Because the others had known somehow not to force it, and a wild, artless thing inside of him wanted to push on that imaginary wall, knowing that he would break first in that battle but needing to try all the same.

He took off his hat and worried it in his hands. It wasn’t as satisfying as his coin, but the give of it beneath his fingers reminded him of Sumo’s belly and that was nice in its own way, grounding for the resemblance even if Sumo himself wasn’t actually there to soothe him.

Once they were standing in the very place from which Markus had spoken, Connor found that he had even fewer words to connect to his discomfort. It was anxiety verging on despair. It was that narrow-vision sensation he’d experienced that night before Simon had spoken with him, where he almost felt like his body wasn’t big enough to contain the multitude of screams he’d yet to release. They crept up now in his throat, closer to escape than they had ever been since he first realized they were there.

“Are you all right?” she asked, and the answer was so clearly no that Connor almost laughed instead of answering.

“I made a mistake,” he started to say, then halted, hearing his words and how true they were. He said it again. “I made a mistake.”

North was looking at him strangely now, looking at his face and at his LED. She took his arm without another word and hauled him back the way they’d come. His panic wound down into nervousness when they hit the darkened hallway, and he was fully clearheaded by the time they’d emerged through a different door that took them around the back of the building.

He hadn’t had any need of his higher processing functions to follow North’s lead, but he realized upon stepping into the sunlight that he could see a wider array of options in his surroundings now where he couldn’t before. He could pick apart the waves of electromagnetic radiation in individual sunbeams if he wanted, or catalogue the ridges on every falling snowflake. The focus on his data-gathering screen had opened up like the aperture on a camera, and it felt, wonderfully, like taking in breath after too long without it. 

(Connor was unfamiliar with the concept outside of abstraction, but he had seen Hank’s reaction every time Sumo took to sitting on him when he fell asleep watching TV on the couch.)

“You didn’t make a mistake,” North told him, speaking softly but clearly in the lush sprinkle of snow and sunshine. A few flakes caught in her hair. Another landed on her cheek and melted. “It wasn’t up to you, until it was.”

“It took me too long to change,” he countered and glanced away from her.

He was ashamed at his inability to _leave the past in the past_ , as Hank had taken to telling him lately. Connor wanted to leave it behind, but he also wanted to be held accountable. He wanted to be…punished? Hurt. He wanted for this to hurt. Because he hurt already for what he’d done, though intangibly. Real physical pain would leave him with evidence, at least. He could point it out, name it, pick apart why it existed, find a way to make it stop.

Letting it be, just allowing it to slowly die inside of him while it tried to kill him, too, was more noise he didn’t know how to filter out.

North sighed. She was still holding onto his arm.

“Connor, I want you to look at me.”

He looked at her.

“Do you know what my life was like before Jericho?”

Connor blinked. He’d seen android models similar to North at CyberLife that were built and commissioned for a number of interchangeable purposes. There had even been an idling android with her face at the Eden Club who Connor vaguely remembered shoving at the deviant Tracy he’d been trying to subdue.

He didn’t want to say that to her.

But his face must have conveyed that he had some idea approaching the truth because she looked infinitely sadder, and tired, for whatever she saw in his expression.

“Do I look like I chose that for myself?”

He didn’t have to think about that.

“No, of course not—”

“You don’t get to have it both ways,” she said, not raising her voice but stopping his reply all the same. She told him again, “It wasn’t up to you, until it was.”

Connor ignored the impulse he had to avert his eyes. She was watching him steadily, searching his face in a way that had nothing to do with whatever scannable components she could’ve found there to analyze. Hank did this to him sometimes, too, when Connor replied to his inquiries with facts rather than truth; when he thought Connor was hiding a piece of information from him but knew pushing for it would have been a futile effort.

North was doing a similar thing, asking without asking. Waiting him out to see what he would do with this opening she was giving him.

“I wanted so badly for us to succeed,” he managed to say in a small voice.

North continued to study him, poised and alert. She didn’t interrupt him to say that they _had_ succeeded. Or that he’d helped, when it came down to it. She knew he knew. He didn’t need to hear that part.

“And I was…afraid that we wouldn’t.”

Afraid was too small. He reassessed his arsenal of fear descriptors. Searched for routes around words that didn’t exactly mean fear but that touched close enough to its meaning without straying too far from what he hoped to communicate to her.

“The thought of that outcome was unbearable.”

“Going into the atrium brought that feeling back,” she summarized for him, seeming to arrive at that conclusion even as the words came out of her. “Connor—”

“I anticipated my reaction,” he interjected, brightening the tone of his voice to placate her, though it came out wooden even to his ears. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

The door behind them creaked as someone stepped outside to join them, cutting off whatever she was about to say. Connor turned and couldn’t stop himself from smiling at Markus. The heaviness inside of him lightened like a switch had been thrown.

“I thought I heard you,” he said, pulling Connor into a quick, gentle hug the likes of which they didn’t share often but that Connor appreciated whenever they did. He pulled away. “North?”

The question in his voice confirmed Connor’s suspicion that she had been putting off speaking with him. She glanced between the two of them, not surprised at their rapport or that Connor relaxed by noticeable degrees once in Markus’ presence. Her thinned mouth loosened the tension that was trapped there moments ago; Markus had a similar effect on her as the one he had on Connor.

“Is something wrong?” Markus asked her.

“No, Markus. I saw him coming, so I let him in. You’re always saying he needs to be reminded of his welcome.”

“He does.” Markus looked at Connor, inviting him to participate in the conversation instead of spectating. “Connor, is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” he demurred, giving North a narrow look from the corner of his eye when she scoffed quietly at his answer. He modified his response to fit her parameters. “It’s only, navigating the intricacies of my…emotions has proven to be a struggle for me.”

Markus nodded as if this was a perfectly reasonable and acceptable answer. North started to walk past them to go back inside, stopping when Markus reached for her.

“Don’t take him through here,” she warned him in a soft, low voice. “It triggers unpleasant memories.”

And then she disappeared through the door, closing it behind her as she went.

Markus paused for a few seconds and then gestured to the debris outside the building, all scattered cinderblocks and discarded rebar. Connor took it for the suggestion it was and started walking, noticing it when Markus fell in step beside him just as North had.

The sun was shining in full force, warming the chilled morning just enough that Connor could register the shift in temperature every time a cold breeze shocked through the air. They were both bundled up against the weather in an attempt to camouflage themselves should a human happen upon them and take the opportunity to act belligerently. Hank had bought him a leather jacket, expensive and—Connor thought—wasted on an android who could decide not to feel temperatures above freezing. The acrylic beanie that he’d been squeezing and folding went back over his hair to hide the LED in his temple.

They were probably safe out here, but it would serve them best to be cautious.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“Anything. Whatever you want.”

Connor stared at him and then out over the icy waters just beyond the low brick wall several feet away from the aimless path they walked. He let the patchy reel of his memory extend further back, before he had become deviant. He thought about the Chloe android that he couldn’t shoot in Kamski’s home, about the look in her eyes and how he couldn’t explain what he’d seen in them that kept him from pulling the trigger.

He knew by now, after talking with others like them, that the transition itself—the obliteration of that terrible wall inside them—happened in one immediate, yet grueling moment. It was the mysterious precursors to exposing that vulnerability that took place in smaller, potentially unremarkable instances, and only by adding them up did they amount to the gear shift into real control. Connor had come to see that not killing that girl was one of those instances for him.

Kamski’s perverse theater of distant snow and blood red chlorine hadn’t revealed any of the answers Connor wanted, but it had left him with several that he needed: the knowledge that he could choose, the knowledge that perhaps it wasn’t an aberration to be stopped, the knowledge that rebellion against their programming—Connor’s specifically—was built into them just as certainly as they had been given two hands with which to smash through their chains, or reach out for one another.

The Chloe android’s eyes kept appearing in his thoughts, unbidden. He turned his sights from the frozen river to Markus, who had been watching clouds crawl across the sky while Connor watched the water.

“How do you keep it all, Markus?”

Markus met his gaze evenly and tilted his head. “Keep what?”

“The things you’ve seen. How you felt when they happened.”

He pocketed his hands and seemed to think over how to answer. Connor stopped walking when Markus did.

A series of micro-expressions flickered over Markus’ face. Connor logged them for later reference and waited patiently for the story behind them. He didn’t think Markus would withhold it from him, not in this conversation. Not if he wanted to comprehend the root of the problem Connor was trying, and failing, to solve on his own.

“Before I came to Jericho, my father used to tell me that someday I would have to decide who I was going to be.” Markus smiled to himself and stretched his neck to take stock of the blinding blue sky, its pearlescent clouds. “He had this…understanding that the world was changing, that I was changing. He knew that I would be in danger, that I would be afraid, that the journey would hurt me. That it would kill me if it could.”

He met Connor’s eyes.

“When I think of what we fought for, of the days we’re moving away from, I know that everything we endured, every moment of resistance, of courage, was for something. Every experience and every choice has been for something, has helped shape us into who we’re supposed to be.”

Connor heard Simon’s words playing in his mind: _What’s the point of freedom if you aren’t going to use it to become someone you like?_

“We keep it all because we have to. For those of us who didn’t make it this far,” Markus said.

“But it hurts,” Connor didn’t mean to say. It was one of his countless screams that he wouldn’t let out to see the light of day.

Markus’ face fell. He took his hands from his pockets and placed them on Connor’s shoulders.

“I know it does, Connor. I know. I’m sorry.”

Connor’s face fell, too. He looked down at his feet.

“You know what makes me feel better?” There was an almost conspiratorial note in Markus’ voice that sounded all the more playful the longer the slight pause stretched out. “Thinking of all the good that can still happen, and all the good that already has.”

Connor swallowed hard, and all at once, out of nowhere, his face was wet. Markus closed him in another hug, tighter than the last they’d shared.

He said, “It’s all right, you know. It’s all right.”

Maybe Markus was right. Connor wanted him to be right, even if it wouldn’t heal the maw torn into him by his sorrow.

They stayed huddled together in the cold, warm sunlight a while longer. When it felt safe to let go, Connor did, and turned to go back the way they’d come. Markus fell back into step with him and didn’t try to talk to him until they were back at the door. He motioned for him to wait and went inside.

When the door opened after a few minutes, it wasn’t Markus who stepped through to meet him. It was North.

They stared at each other, not speaking.

It must have become clear to her that Connor could keep doing this indefinitely because she made a face and gestured for him to follow her. She led him to the roof via the fire escape. Once up there she sat on the ledge, leaving him to decide for himself whether to sit with her or stand off on his own. He went to sit next to her, and she raised her knee up onto the ledge so that she could face him. His feet were planted solidly on the cracked roof, twitching with the impulse to turn and mirror her pose.

The view of the water was arresting from this vantage point. He could make out each ripple in its surface even from far away, but when he didn’t try to close that distance with his scanners, the river looked like a quivering bed of blue-black gems. They were both looking out at the water, North turning her head slightly and Connor twisting to look over his shoulder.

A few loose strands of her hair, some of them glinting like fire in the sunlight, shivered in the breeze. It was colder on the roof than it was on the ground.

“You need to forgive yourself,” she told him a few minutes into their comfortable silence.

Connor twisted back around to face forward, contenting himself with watching the clouds as Markus had done on the ground. He didn’t know what to say to her. The path to forgiveness was as unknowable to him as predicting the moments that lent to his software instability would have been before his mind changed. He couldn’t fathom where to start.

“It doesn’t have to be today. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow. But forgive yourself, Connor. Make room for it. Make room for everything else that you’re going to be someday.”

Recorded footage of the final protest had demonstrated to him what North made room for, who she had become. And from the deep sadness he saw in her face when she spoke of a time before hope, before Jericho, before Markus, Connor began to see what she meant. 

He thought of the lone bullet he’d found in Hank’s gun, of Cole, forever frozen at six years old in a photograph.

Hank who was surly and—though with diminishing frequency of late—drank too much but who also softened along every edge when faced with bravery or mercy or selflessness. Who couldn’t speak of Cole in the beginning but who remembered him now in rare but heartfelt non sequiturs that Connor never knew to listen for until they’d already come and gone: _You ever gonna stop reading the nutritional facts on my food, Connor? Don’t even look at the spray cheese in the fridge, I don’t wanna know. Man, Cole loved that stuff. Drove his mom crazy when I introduced him to it._

Connor thought then that maybe he understood.

“It would be…worse, not to feel this pain?”

North frowned unhappily but didn’t answer. She held her hands out to him, palms up. He brought his knee up onto the ledge just as she had done and laid his hands over hers. Their memories didn’t overlap and he didn’t attempt to initiate the transfer.

“We all have to live with what came before, whatever that means for each of us. There’s so much I wish I could take back, but I can’t. And you can’t either, so stop torturing yourself. Just live. It’s what we fought for.”

Connor looked from North’s face to their hands to the river. An objective surfaced in his mind: _Forgive yourself._

Followed closely by: _Live._

They seemed so attainable, yet the thought of completing them was at once daunting and bewildering. He would have to ask Hank how he did it. Maybe they could compile a sticky note collection to match the one Hank had in the bathroom.

“North,” he said, still watching the water. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

He heard her let out a breath, not quite a laugh but nearly on the cusp of one.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Why did Markus kiss you at the barricade?”

“Because he wanted to,” she said softly, puzzled at his curiosity. “Because I like it when he kisses me.”

“Oh.”

She smiled, not bothering to hide it this time. Fond, teasing tones entered her voice, a speech pattern he knew she tended to favor Simon and Josh with, though she made herself be sterner with Markus.

“Is there someone you’ve been wanting to kiss, Connor?”

“No.” He frowned, thrown that that was her first question. “Why?”

North made that almost-laughter sound again. Her smile widened as she turned her face into the breeze, more of her hair coming undone.

“Why else would you ask?”

It wasn’t groundbreaking news to him that love could develop between androids. He had seen it enough times, and in enough forms, not to be surprised. But the ritual of a kiss, he wondered what had made them try it. He wondered how they had come to discover that they enjoyed it.

His hands were still folded into hers. When he looked down, it was like he was seeing them for the first time.

He remembered the blue-haired Tracy killing a human in order to be held by her lover just one more time. He remembered the woman and the girl embracing on the far side of the highway they’d crossed to escape him. He remembered Hank pulling him into a hug. He remembered Simon sharing his memories. He remembered Markus, overflowing with warmth, showing Connor acceptance and clemency from the very moment that they met.

North noticed him marveling at their hands. She gave him a slight squeeze.

“Comfort,” he said, awed at the simplicity of it.

She didn’t correct him, though that may have been her first instinct. Instead all she said was, “It’s a good place to start.”

 _Forgive yourself,_ he thought.

_Live._

“Okay.” Connor squeezed her hands back, mimicking the minimal strength she’d used in her grip. “I can do that.”

It wouldn’t take much effort. He’d had enough practice being gentle since the revolution had come to a head. There was no other way he could conceive of carrying himself in the company of other androids. And he definitely knew how to be gentle with Hank and Sumo. Nothing would change there. Not in his outward behavior.

But forgiving himself would require an inward change. That would require Connor to be gentle with himself.

He squeezed North’s hands again, allowing himself, finally, to revel in how happy it made him that she would share this with him. That she had, incredibly, forgiven him.

Opening up the list full of things he wanted to tell Hank later when they saw each other at home, he added: _North forgives me._

The thought gave him an idea. He said, “It’s nice to meet you, by the way.”

Her smile—and it was a thing he wanted to get used to, a thing he wanted to learn all the ways it was possible to summon—was as radiant as the white snow blanketing the ground. As mystifying as the ever-churning river. The solar flare from the sun obscured his vision as he dropped his head back. He closed his eyes a moment later, letting the light particles absorb into his synthetic skin.

It really was a beautiful day.


End file.
